Bold Girls Study Materials
What to Expect in the exam:
You won’t know which part of the play the extract will come from, so you need to be familiar with the
main ideas of the whole play, and know what happens in each scene (use the notes above to help
you).
Study your grids with information on the characters and what they say - this will be very helpful for
the final question, as you will have a good idea of what the main ideas of each scene are so you can
refer to them. Read the notes below on each scene, and take notes about the themes and symbols
highlighted on page 4. Finally, there is last year’s past paper on Bold Girls to try out.
Key Scene Notes
Scene 1: Marie’s House
The play is set in a world of Belfast drizzle and dreichness; the almost poetic scene directions capture
this for the director; ‘it is irons and ironing boards and piles of clothes … socks and pegs and damp
sheets …’ Toys everywhere tell us of children, pots and pans of domesticity and the ordinariness and
clutter. Two images set out the play’s concerns — the picture of the virgin and the bigger and ‘blownup’ photograph of the as yet unidentified Michael, Marie’s husband … And then there’s Deirdre,
crouching outside the room, but outside in further senses, in that she’s meant to be in the darkness of
the Belfast streets, but also in the darkness of her hopelessness and of her sorrows. We don’t know
who she is; as yet she’s only the wary, young face, speaking a ferocious drama-poetry. Her
appearance establishes the next layer of the drama beyond Marie’s positive presence; and tells us
that sometimes the play will not be realistic. Deirdre remembers the hills, and singing birds, but can’t
see or hear them; the modern streets and the helicopter overhead have come between. Munro won’t
attempt to join such sudden surrealism with the main action; it simply happens, then gives way to the
main narrative.
And Marie comes before us with sheer vigour and integrity. Her children are there — but not allowed
to appear, or to diminish our attention to her. Children and men are significantly not allowed to
appear at all. Nora appears, with Marie’s towels — and two slight, but important points are made.
Wee Michael was supposed to get them, but didn’t; and Nora covers up for his domestic failure — as
she always does for men. Cassie shows her sharpness, her earthy sexuality revealing itself in the
knickers episode — it doesn’t matter that they are Marie’s, with wee black cats on them saying Hug
me, I’m cuddly; it’s Cassie who has highlighted them. All the Bold Girls have appeared, and already the
menace of Deirdre, the outsider, should contrast with the apparent normality and friendly banter of
the women, centred around Marie, with mother and daughter Nora and Cassie not listening to each
other, but revealing their key characteristics — Nora’s harassed and male-dominated domesticity,
Cassie’s sharp rejection of it.
Munro leaves Deirdre outside; and scene one is ordinary enough, on the surface — kids, washing,
fags, whether to go to the club; the topics are mundane. They seem harmless enough Bold Girls, their
worst excesses being to do with having too much to drink, or chatting up taxi drivers. Is Nora maybe a
bit obsessive about her house and her peach fabric? And where are the men?
Clues begin to emerge; ‘Michael’s been dead three and half years’, cries Cassie, urging Marie out, and
shocking her mother. Cassie seems unduly nervous of Marie’s ghost-talk of Michael, though
significantly none of them are unduly bothered by explosions outside. And what hidden depths to
Cassie are revealed in her planting of money behind Michael’s photograph?
A major connection is established between Deirdre and Marie with the lighting change which, we’ll
come to know, changes the play’s mode from realism to expressionism; first Deirdre, outside,
developing her association with greyness, violence, loneliness; then a monologue from Marie, filling
us in about her innocence, goodness, and childish optimism in the days when she was first married.
We now know that Michael is/was her husband, if little else than that he was charismatic, a bold boy.
Munro allows attitudes regarding the Brits, the soldiers who are everywhere, to emerge; cleverly,
they are shown early in a good light, so that we don’t get tempted into stereotyping. This set against
the ‘thunderous knocking’ at the door which follows the sound of gunshots; although it transpires
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that this time it’s not the brutal entry of troops, but the unexpected opposite; Deirdre, dirty,
battered, looking like fifteen, though eyes heavily made up; second-nameless, unplaceable to the
curious women. Again, questions force themselves on us; who on earth is she, with her unnatural
toughness and vulnerability? Has she some connection with the violence? Is she a terrorist? She
stonewalls all attempts to find her identity — and her fierce knife monologue raises more questions
than it reveals. Why is she so bitter? What kind of truth is it she’s after? How has she been able to see
the street-violence she clearly knows too well, when, at her age, she should be home with a family?
And, once again, where are the men?
And at last we begin to hear what’s happened to them. Nora’s Sean is dead (Cassie nostalgic about
her father’s gentleness to her), her son Martin and Cassie’s husband Joe are in Long Kesh Terrorist
prison. (Isn’t there something odd in the curiously slapstick way Nora and Cassie do a double act
about the night Cassie’s husband Joe was arrested? How can they laugh at this horrific treatment of
women?) And Marie’s brother Davey seems to be in jail too; while her husband Michael has had his
head blown off. Scene one has saved the most horrific revelation for the end; but there are still so
many unanswered questions — such as how Michael met his death, who killed him, or why Cassie so
misses her father.
Marie and Deirdre end the scene; Marie with her moving lullaby to Brendan, rocking him to sleep
with her praise of Michael in heaven (but we note Cassie’s unease; why is she suddenly so keen to be
out of Belfast?), and her praise of the bold men, ‘all men you’d look at twice’, remembered for their
card-playing, drinking, sentimental party singing. It’s intriguing that this mood of remembrance is
capped with the reappearance of Deidre. Why is she so changed? How does she know where the
hidden money is? And why has Munro chosen to let her steal the scene with this sharply jarring
action? We’re left with a final impression of three (or four, if we count Deirdre) separate lines of
thought developing. The girls may seem to communicate, but they don’t really listen to each other;
there are private selves, motives, and agendas behind the apparent neighbourliness.
Scene 2: The Club
Again, stage directions are vivid and atmospheric; it’s worth briefly assessing just how significant they
are, and just how much they help fix our responses to what follows.
There’s a clever opening here, in which we as audience have to find our feet as regards what’s going
on. Who’s being talked about? Why are they standing? It’s an effective way of underlining the
repetitiveness of the violence — this has happened many times. And it reminds Marie of coffins —
and Michael?
The club, with its garish decor and its get-rich-quick games, is an appropriate place for the girls to
recall their men and the famous wall-and-dog story, and by now sensitive response to the play is
questioning whether these memories can be taken at face value. After all, Nora’s husband cheated in
betting, and Michael lost his car. Isn’t there something a bit strained about the brave face memory
puts on? Isn’t Cassie showing more and more that she’s hardly got sorrowful feelings about ‘the dear
departed’?
And isn’t something a bit strained about the toast to the bold girls by themselves? Again, we note the
three simultaneous lines of topic; ‘Guess the Price’, Nora and Cassie’s sniping, the discussions of
Deirdre’s boldness in Marie’s clothes all run together, intermingled. It’s a clever way of mingling
themes. The materialism which defines Nora and Cassie emerges in the first (‘Oh Mummy! She’s won
the magi-mix!’ shows that the world of prizes and things can bring them to agreement); in the second,
we learn more of Nora’s survival toughness from her strange treatment of the past in her anecdotes
(which are almost monologues — serving what purpose?), and of Cassie’s bitterness. What is Cassie’s
brazen dance really saying? And, in the third line, after the raid which freezes time and the club,
releasing Marie and Deirdre into a kind of shared, stylised dialogue, we ask more questions about
what’s making Deirdre the utterly unfeeling and amoral person she seems to be.
It’s becoming clear now that Cassie’s dislike of Deirdre has deeper undertones to it than simple
loyalty to her friend. The past is here too, in Marie’s uncanny feeling of having seen Deirdre before. Is
Deirdre here to have something out? With Marie or Cassie? Why does she not defend herself against
Cassie’s final attack?
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And why does the scene end, not with the drama we’ve been witnessing, but with an oddly placed
stylised monologue from Nora deriding the use of talk, and leaving us with her obsessive yearning for
fifteen yards of pale peach polyester fabric?
Scene 3: Outside the Club
This short scene, three pages of dialogue between Marie and Cassie, with a typically wordless, brief
and nasty contribution from Deirdre at the end, poses questions. Just why is it so unbalanced with the
rest of the play, so disproportionate in size? Why change from interior setting of house and club to
wasteland and moonlight? Is there significant and symbolic connection with what’s happening
between Marie and Cassie (and with all the bold girls) in the fact that there’s an eclipse of the moon
— ‘our very own shadow swallowing up all the light’? A simple enough answer to the first question
regarding length might suggest that staging considerations call for time to allow the resetting of
Marie’s house for scene 4; that said, Munro is far too skilful a dramatist to allow mere stage necessity
to dominate. Marie and Cassie here show their closeness; there is a great strength in this bonding, a
strength which has supported all of them in hard times. But there is a crack in this togetherness; and
this wedge of a scene drives home the first real division between them all, a knife-point which will
come close to destroying them all by the end. Cassie’s ‘Aw Jesus I hate this place!’ as she kicks the
very ground she lives on, her agonised desire to leave, and Marie’s reminder of the claims of children,
reinforce our awareness of Cassie’s tortured heart and Marie’s (self-deceiving?) goodness. Do all the
bold girls have some kind of self-deluding dream? Don’t Marie, Nora, Cassie — and even Deirdre — all
in the end reveal that they are holding on to some kind of consoling dream of past or future?
Certainly Deirdre, stealer of purses, seems more of a straightforward destroyer as she finds her
longed-for knife and slashes at Nora’s dream-fabric. But, looking deeper, can’t we see that she too is
following a kind of distorted dream?
Scene 4: Marie’s House
Our impression of Marie’s steady goodness is reinforced by the picture of her feeding birds in the
pitch blackness, while Nora and Cassie continue to drink. (Do you think that Munro means us to see
drink as one of the major problems in this play?) A latent hostility between Nora and Cassie comes to
a head in this scene of many climaxes, as memories of the menfolk — and a new ugliness, that of
wife-beating — surfaces through the alcoholic haze. With the discovery that her hidden money, the
dream-of-escape-money, is gone, the antagonism (is it indeed hatred?) between mother and
daughter explodes, and we see the resentment of years, with Cassie’s comment that her mother’s
heart is made of steel, a condemnation oddly qualified with understanding — ‘she had to grow it that
way’.
Have we been prepared for the horrific admissions from Cassie which follow? Has Munro planted
enough clues to suggest to us that deep down we aren’t surprised? Remember, however, when
considering Cassie’s betrayal of Marie, what Deirdre will say about Cassie’s appearance when making
love with Michael; ‘she looked like my grandmother, old and tired and like she didn’t care about
anything at all anymore…’. Does this help us to understand Cassie’s betrayal of her best friend?
Unusually, the play has yet another ending; perhaps more important than the revelation of Cassie’s
affair with Michael. Deirdre comes back from what may have been an attempt to rape her, after the
club closed. She brings back most of the stolen money — and her knife. She seems poised between
attacking Marie and talking to her — poised, perhaps, between two different kinds of ‘hard truth’?
Her choice has to wait; after revealing to Marie that Michael is her father, she wants some kind of
confirmation from her. But can Marie ever give Deirdre the ‘truth’ she’s after? She can destroy
Michael’s photograph, and her own and Deirdre’s remaining illusions, she can tell her that she does
look like Michael, and what Michael had for tea, and that someone — Provos, enemies, does it
ultimately matter? — ‘took the lying head off him’; but the truth about Michael, and Cassie’s father,
and all the other men implicated in their lives, will surely remain elusive, as Marie’s last big speech
about ‘all the daddys’ admits. All that can be hoped is that ‘we learn some way to change’, in our
dealings with each other, women to women, men to men, and women and men to each other.
How far does Marie reveal in these closing stages that she isn’t and has never really been the trusting
innocent, the feeder of birds? How far — and why — has she been living a lie? And how far can we
read the end, with its partial reconciliation of Deirdre and her sorrows with Marie and hers, as
optimistic? What is the significance of the play’s closing actions, the return to ordinary domesticity
and the feeding of the birds?
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Themes
Images and symbols
Take notes on the importance of the following:
* Nora’s peach fabric
* Deirdre’s knife
* the birds that are fed by Marie
* the pictures (The Virgin Mary and Michael) on Marie’s walls.
Values of contemporary society
To what extent is Cassie an example of the hopes and desires of young women? What does she want
out of life? What prevents her from getting what she wants?
Cassie’s story is affected by the Troubles, but in fact she could be any young woman living in any
rundown estate in any town in Scotland. Looking at what she tells us in the play: How is she
influenced by television and magazines? Are the things she wants within her reach?
Truth and illusion
This is a play about women living in a ‘war zone’, struggling with poverty and difficult social
conditions, as single parents. One of the strategies adopted by Nora, Marie and Cassie is the
avoidance of truth and the creation of a comforting illusion. Taking each character in turn, and paying
close reference to the text, consider what illusions they create and what truths they avoid.
For example, Nora is exceptionally house proud – look at the references to her fabric and to the
lamented bamboo suite that was destroyed by the British soldiers. What sort of magazines do you
think she would read? What would her favourite programme on daytime television be? If Nora could
have a dream come true, what do you think it would be?
On the other hand, what is going wrong in Nora’s life? To what extent does she face up to the truth of
this or hide behind a dream?
Think about the significance of Deidre’s knife. She refers to a knife as ‘a wee bit of hard truth you
could hold in your hand and pint where you liked’. Why do you think truth is important to Deirdre?
Think about her background and upbringing.
The play is full of examples of lies and deceit. List as many examples of lies and the concealing of
information as you can. Does everyone have a secret?
Bold girls and bold boys: gender issues
* Why do you think the play is entitled Bold Girls?
* What messages about women’s lives and the challenges they have to face does Rona Munro give
the audience? Identify three incidents from the play that illustrate this.
* What messages about men’s lives does the writer give the audience? While the men do not appear
on stage, identify one thing each of the women tell us about their men (Michael, Sean, Joe and
Martin) that illustrate this?
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Last Year’s Past Paper – 2014
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